Well, the time has come for me to finally close down my WordPress site.
I began blogging after my three kids moved out of our house within a month of each other, and fell into a depression I couldn’t shake. My lovely therapist suggested that I write out my pain, and I did, beginning with my blog “Post Departum Depression.”
You have all been there to support me as my kids grew up, my career came to an end, and I moved into the world of grandparenting.
You have been my counselors, my friends, my partners in this journey, and I will sorely miss our connections.
But the time has come for me to move on. I hope to continue writing, at least a bit, on Medium. If you are so inclined, I am writing under my own name, Karen Shiebler. If any of you would like to stay in touch like real life human friends, please email me at momshieb@gmail.com.
Thank you.
So very much.
Thank you for your empathy, your humor, your shared struggles and your feeling of community. I wish each and every one of you continued health, happiness, laughter and writing opportunities. You all have such strong and important voices, and I have learned so much from all of you!
I have written about my ridiculously lucky life both here and on other sites. I have had 66 years of unearned health, happiness, serendipity, and joy.
Given all of that, I don’t really complain much. I mean, how could I?
But the past few months have taught me some lessons about adjusting to those moments in life when the crazy luck fades away a bit.
Last August I had 12 hours of brain surgery to remove an acoustic neuroma that was wrapping itself around a couple of my cranial nerves. It was completely benign, and my recovery was absolutely uncomplicated. That luck was on my side! The tumor was mostly removed, and I didn’t suffer from the facial paralysis that often follows this surgery.
Three weeks ago I went back to the neurosurgeons to have a one-time radiation treatment that they call “Gamma Knife surgery.” The good doctors screwed a titanium frame onto my skill, as you can see above. Then they zapped the remaining tumor with gamma rays so it is less likely to come back in the future.
So I’m theoretically all done with treatment for this thing and am ready to put it behind me. Hurray, hoorah, yippee kai-ai-ay.
And that’s why it strikes me as odd that I am feeling a little discouraged about the whole thing. I have made it a choice to keep focusing on the good parts of all of this. My taste has returned. My right eye is no longer painfully dry. The tingles that ran across the right side of my face for six months have mostly disappeared and walking outside in the sunlight is no longer too much for my addled vestibular system to handle.
But I’m totally, completely, irrevocably deaf in my right ear. Like most people my age, I have also lost a bit of hearing in my left ear. In a quiet, one-to-one conversation, this isn’t a problem, as long as my friend remembers not to stand behind me. I’m adjusting to it; I have several sets of mismatched earrings so that I can wear a green one in my good ear and a red one in my bad.
But when I am with a large group, I am alone in my partial deafness. We just spent a few days with old friend in Arizona. It was exciting, fun, and incredibly frustrating. I would ask someone a question, but as they answered me, their voice would be drowned out by the sound of water running in the sink, or someone laughing, or dishes rattling. I kept leaning in, turning my head, cupping my ear like someone from an old movie. It was exhausting. My head hurt the whole time.
Thanksgiving was worse. I always love hosting this epic foodie holiday. I love the crowd and the laughter and the pie.
But this year, with my little house absolutely packed, the entire day felt like standing in a giant wind tunnel. I heard roaring. I heard bursts of laughter. I heard a few words. But mostly I felt like I was standing next to a jet engine all day.
It wasn’t fun. It was depressing, honestly. And the constant struggle to hear and understand made me dizzy and off balance.
You see, the acoustic nerve and the vestibular nerve are branches of the same nerve. So my balance is damaged along with my hearing. It’s not terrible; I can do pretty much everything I want to do on a daily basis.
That’s the positive part.
The negative is that while I go about my day, taking care of my grandkids, cooking, doing laundry, etc, I am continually working to stay upright. I can’t look over my shoulder as I walk. I can’t safely enter a dark room. I can’t lean over to pick things up off the floor. Not without toppling into a heap.
So I find myself in the interesting position of learning to accept some permanent losses (my right ear, my balance) without falling into self-pity. I need to figure out how to grieve about what won’t come back while being grateful for what stayed.
I wish I could hear in a crowd. I wish I could go to a nighttime festival of lights without getting nauseous and scared. I wish I didn’t have a big, aching scar on my skull. I wish I could feel my right ear.
Well.
I’m still the luckiest person I know, honest! I know that.
I am very happy to report that I have recovered enough from my brain surgery to watch my sweet two-year-old grandson a couple of days a week. Huzzah! Sitting at home alone recuperating has been surprisingly awful for me. I think back to my days as a working Mom of three, when I thought that the perfect week would be one with no commitments, no pressures, and not a single thing to do all day. I thought I would love sitting in my favorite chair with a cup of tea, a few good cookies, and a new book.
But I had no idea how stifling, how demoralizing, how eradicating it would feel to do that for a month or more.
I am not enjoying my time as a recovering patient. Not when I look out my window and see my overgrown, autumn-ready gardens and know that I can’t get out there to weed or prune or divide my perennials. Not when I see the stains on my upholstery and know that I can’t pull out my steam cleaner and get to work.
So now that I am well enough to have my little Maxy here a couple of days a week, I am absolutely ecstatic. I plan every week around the two days when he’ll be here with me and I will have someone to play with.
But.
Taking care of a really energetic little boy while trying to coddle a recently jangled brain is more involved than I realized. I know that I really shouldn’t be lifting my 30lb boy, but how do you not help your favorite person climb into your lap when he’s repeating the word “hug”? How do you resist playing “where’s Max” in the crawling tunnels?
You don’t.
This means that by early afternoon it is nap time. Maybe not for Max, but definitely for Nonni. Last week when he was here, I decided that he and I should nap together in my king-sized bed. That way I wouldn’t have to lift him in and out of his crib and I’d have an excuse to sleep. I snuggled the two of us down, handed him his favorite stuffed animals, and turned on the white noise. And we both slept for over an hour.
Heaven, I tell you. Heaven. Even the dogs slept soundly beside us last week.
Yesterday was a different story. Because of a Zoom call that was set up right at nap time, we were a bit late in getting to bed. You know how toddlers can go past sleepy and emerge straight into whirling dervish mode?
Yeah. That happened.
After a busy and playful morning, I was wiped out. My back hurt, my head throbbed, my giant scar was pinchy. I had to lie down. On ice. In the dark.
So I closed the shades, got the stuffies, turned on the white noise, pulled a soft blanket over us both, and closed my eyes.
The next 30 minutes were hilarious, if not restful.
Max rolled back and forth with a stuffed moose on his chest, singing a sweet and melodic “One, hoo, free, figh!” over and over. Eventually, the missed number made me crazy so I had to insert a loud “four” in there. Alas, now he knew I was awake.
Bad mistake.
A minute later a warm arm came around my neck and I heard a whisper. “Onni, hug!” We hugged, and I told him to go to sleep. We said good night, and I closed my eyes.
This time it wasn’t an arm around me, it was a relatively large two-year-old skull that slammed into my belly. I let out a grunt.
“Hi, Onni!”
Roll over, away from the head, the hugs, and the whispers. Try to rest.
“Onni, I wuv oo. I wuv oo. I wuv oo.”
The little sneak has never said that to me before. Ever.
Sigh.
Roll back over, pull him close, kiss his head and tell him I love him, too.
“Now, go to sleep, Max. It’s nap time. Close your eyes.”
I close mine. Take some deep breaths.
What that I feel? Like a spiderweb on my cheek. I open my eyes to see Max’s big brown eyes about an inch from mine. His soft hair is tickling my face and his delighted grin is looming over me.
“Onni,” he is crooning, “Open oo eyes.”
I burst into a laugh, in spite of myself, gather him into my arms and ask, “You wanna get up?”
It’s OK. When we get out into the living room, he decides to play “family”. I pretend to be the tired Nonni and he tells me to lie down on the sofa, where he covers me with a blanket and I close my eyes.
Where was my spark, or spirit, or soul during my long surgery?
In the hours and days since my brain surgery three weeks ago, I have found myself wondering about the process itself. Not so much the mechanical or medical parts of the surgery; to be honest, the less I think about that, the better off I am.
I keep wondering how it could be possible for a whole group of surgeons to open my skull, remove a tumor, and sew everything back together without my being aware of any of it. I was on that operating table, unaware of anything at all, for twelve full hours.
Twelve hours, during which I felt nothing. I was unaware of the table beneath me, the tube in my throat, the cuts into my skin, muscle, bone or brain. I heard nothing at all. There was no smell or taste.
There was no time.
The many hours between my taking deep breaths into the mask on my face and my awareness of people calling my name felt like an absence of time. I didn’t feel myself slipping into sleep. I was breathing, and then I was waking up.
But twelve hours had gone by.
An entire day was gone.
And I can’t help but wonder, where did I go? Where was the essence of me, of Karen? If my consciousness was simply suspended, what does that mean?
I think that it is a kind of death, but it is a death of the spirit only; the body that houses my spirit was kept alive by a bunch of machines and a team of medical professionals. My heart kept beating, my blood moved, my lungs exchanged oxygen for carbon dioxide. I stayed alive.
But there were no thoughts. None. Nothing.
If my spirit wasn’t there, what does it mean to have had my body keep going? I am obviously happy that my body DID keep going, and that when the good doctors called my spirit back home, it had a home to return to.
Still, I can’t quite come to terms with the fact that the key part of myself, the part that loves and thinks and grieves, was simply able to fly away. I can’t help but think of that team of doctors and nurses as mystical sorcerers who captured the spark of energy that is Nonni/Mom/me and held it for those long hours in a secret place. I can’t help but think of the spark diminished, like the coals of a banked fire. Smoldering and waiting to be brought back into a burst of bright flame when the time was right.
I keep thinking about death. I keep thinking that death and deep unconsciousness are so close. In both cases, the body loses all of its senses. It cannot hear or feel or see. But in death, the body stops functioning, while the little spark of life goes on.
I wonder where I was during that long day. I wonder? While my husband and kids waited for news from the hospital, why didn’t I even dream? While the city of Boston wilted in the heat and people bustled all around the hospital where I lay, why was I unaware of anything at all, even of myself?
I don’t expect any answers to any of this. I just need to share it.
This entire experience has given me a renewed belief that life goes on well after the body can no longer hold it. Now I have an image of a great pile of glowing coals, little spirit lights, waiting to be reawakened to live again. I have an image of those spirits rising up and floating the join the crowd of other glowing lights after death.
It’s comforting.
But I can’t help wondering where I was for all those hours.
I’ve always been pleased to think of myself as a lifelong learner. I am proud, usually, of my intellectual curiosity.
I now have absolute proof that I am a nerd. I should really buy myself a Nerdy Nonni Tshirt.
Here’s what I mean.
I woke up from the pounding head pain last night and realized that the word “disgust” comes directly from the Latin root for taste, or “gustare”. Huh, I thought, holding the icepack to my temple. “Gusto. Gust. Disgust. Offtaste. Bad taste. This tastes disgusting.”
Side note: nobody mentioned to me that I might experience a sensation referred to as a loss of taste or a diminishing of the sense of taste. But I do have that. And guess what? Everything tastes disgusting.
When my Dad had heart surgery many years ago, we were all gathered around his bed as he came out of anesthesia. We asked him what he was thinking, clearly expecting some deep words of wisdom from the philosophical man at the center of our world. Dad paused and said, “I was using Pythagorean theorem to calculate the number of ceiling tiles in my room.”
Oh.
When I woke up from my own surgery (after my round of trying to throat punch all the white coats), I found myself avoiding the pain by recalling all the lyrics to every old Russian folk song that I learned a half-century ago. I was able to recall every word of “Katiusha!”
молодец!
What an interesting experience I am having! I’m learning many new things, about myself and about the world around me.
One thing I have learned is to use my icepack as soon my head feels like it’s being jumped on by a troop of chimps.
I am about to try something that I have never tried before. I am about to attempt to write a post while floating painfully around my ceiling in a haze of opioid medication.
I apologize in advance. For the typos, misspellings, random words, and trailing thoughts. I apologize for the lines that will seem completely pointless to you but will have me thinking of myself as both witty and articulate.
Why am I doing this?
Well, obviously, because I am feeling the effects of the medication. I do NOT like this feeling. At all. In fact, I have spent the past 4 days drinking as much water as possible to flush my system and have used nothing other than acetaminophen and ice to manage the discomfort. I thought I was a very rugged old soul, strong and able to manage pain. Thought I was being a good patient and all that. Yay, me.
But I was sent home a week ago on a high dose of a steroid called dexamethasone, which was prescribed to control the inevitable swelling that happens after neurosurgeons dig around in a person’s brain matter for half a day. I knew that the medication was helping to keep my symptoms (ie, pain) under control. In fact, last week before my discharge I met with my nice neurosurgeon, whom I shall henceforth refer to as “Doctor Understatement.” I told him just how great I was feeling, and he cautioned me.
“Remember that once you’re off the steroids, you might get a headache.”
A headache.
A headache?!
I have had headaches my whole life. I brushed him off. I am Nonni. I ain’t afraid of no headache.
Sure, my head, and most of the rest of me, was uncomfortable all week. But it wasn’t interfering with anything. I was fine. All was well until around noon yesterday when the pounding and aching started up in earnest. Ice. Heat. Acetominophen. Repeat. The pain kept slowly creeping up. Stretch, walk, deep breaths, ice, heat, acetaminophen.
It kept on creeping, bit by bit, a little stronger with time.
I tried to sleep last night, but couldn’t find any way to be comfortable. By midnight, I felt terrible.
You see, a regular old headache is that bad pain on the inside of your skull. You feel like your brain is swollen and throbbing. Like a stubbed toe. I had that. I had a LOT of that pain.
A more unusual headache is the pain that you get after the outside of your skull has experienced some kind of trauma or accident. I had that, too. I had a TON of that pain.
And then there is tinnitus, also known as ringing, buzzing, whizzing, fizzing, roaring sounds in a person’s head that aren’t really there. I had a boatload of that shit going on.
I lay there for a while with my stubbed brain throbbing, wondering why my sleeping husband sounded like an entire Roman army marching across the rocks. My stitches itched and pinched. My bonks throbbed. Every eyeblink hurt and every heartbeat sounded like a distant bomb going off.
So I got up and made a bagel. I ate it sitting up in bed, with an ice pack on my neck and a lavendar hot pack on my eyes.
By 1AM, I gave in. I took the stupid little pill. I curled up like a shriveled worm and slowly drifted off into pounding, hissing, dinging achy sleep for about 4 hours.
So what is my point?
(Wait. Give me a minute.)
Oh. Right.
My point is this: when you have a way out of a tough situation, for goodness sake, take it. I should never have let the pain get that bad. Instead of staying ahead of it, I wanted to be some sort of warrior woman and I put myself through a lot of unpleasantness that I didn’t have to go through.
My point is that even in the most deserving of times, too many of us (me, I mean) continue to judge ourselves and to put pressure on ourselves. Nobody cared if I took my medicine. It was only me and Paul in that bedroom. I don’t know what I was hoping to prove to myself.
So this morning, after I finally pried open my sticky eyes and took a hot shower with peppermint soap to wake me up, I was determined to stay ahead of things. I sat outside, had a good breakfast, walked around the house, stretched. I felt the pain coming back. So of course, I went to my routine: ice, heat, acetaminophen. A couple of hours later, it was rising again like a tide. What a strange sensation. I should have immediately taken that pill, but I hesitated.
I reached out to my support team, Paul, and our kids. I asked for advice. And you know what they said, more or less?
“What the hell are you waiting for? You do not need to spend all day with a stubbed, traumatized, buzzing skull. Take the pill.”
I listened. I took it.
Well. I thought this was going to be funny. Lesson learned. Sometimes the post simply writes itself.
Well, I have to say, I am happy to have that behind me!
Thanks so much to everyone who has been sending good wishes, healing vibes, goodies, cards, jokes, and cheers. I never fully understood before this just how vital it is to live with so much love and support.
Today I just want to say, HI! I’m alive! So far the brains seem relatively unscrambled and I am on the mend. It won’t be a deep or philosophical post because, you know. I just had FREAKIN BRAIN SURGERY.
So let’s hit the funny highlights, shall we?
Key lessons learned from brain surgery.
You have to laugh. You just have to keep that sense of humor. And when you are an old lady with her eyeballs spinning in her cracked head, lying in a hospital bed in a baggy blue johnny, just picturing yourself is enough to make you laugh. When you open those blurry eyes and find your old self surrounded by bright and beautiful young nurses and doctors, you damn well better stay humorous.
When they tell you that you will “sleep” through your surgery, believe them. In my case, I was chatting with the nice anesthesiologist(s) and breathing in the little mask. Just as I started to drift off, it seemed to me that about 50 people started yelling my name and shaking me. My reaction, naturally, was perfectly calm and logical. Luckily for the lovely young folks surrounding me in my moment of vulnerability, I was unable to articulate my thoughts. Because this is what I was thinking, “What the FUCK is wrong with you?!! I’m supposed to be unconscious!!!!” For a few seconds, I thought they were calling the whole thing off and I was plenty mad. I have a vague memory of trying to smack one handsome young man in his handsome young face. In reality, I had been “asleep” for 12 hours while they sawed my skull, poked around my nerves, dug out the tumor, and stitched me back up again.
This is not the best weight loss plan, but it works. When you have your vestibular nerve removed (cut? killed? sliced?), every movement of your eyeballs makes you feel sick. Even the thought of your favorite food makes you erp. Ah, the joys of sucking on a piece of ginger all day…….
When the nice nurses tell you to “rest”, do not react. They mean well. They do. It’s just that they are doing their jobs when they wake you up every 14 minutes around the clock in the ICU. They really do need to check your heart rate/temperature/blood pressure/blood sugar/platelets/blood count. You do need to wake up to take your pain meds, blood pressure meds, steroids, laxatives and pepcid to offset the side effects. You get the idea.
Neurosurgery means that every morning for the first few days, you will open your groggy eyes and find yourself surrounded by approximately 125 eager young faces who want to “check your neuro status”. They will ask you very difficult questions like, “What is your name? Where are we? What is the date?” All of this info will be written on the board across from you, and you will have been staring at it endlessly for hours (as it is the one thing that isn’t jumping around). You will answer. They will shine lights in your eyes, ask you to smile, stick out your tongue, raise your eyebrows, make a pucker. They will tell you you’re doing great. Four minutes later, another group (this time for ENT) will go through the same thing only this time they add a tuning fork. Four minutes after that, one of your surgeons will repeat it. And four minutes after that, your other surgeon will have a turn. You are sure to know you name by the time you leave, I promise.
Being deaf in one ear is not all bad, believe me. When you are in an ICU with all the bings, bells, dings, voices, hisses, clicks and bangs, it is a GREAT gift to be able to sleep on your good ear and make it all go away.
Most of all, what I learned from my coconut cracking experience is that I am one very very very lucky woman. The doctors and nurses at Tufts Medical Center in Boston are absolutely amazing. Especially those nurses, who are absolutely tireless as they calm, medicate, clean, soothe, assess, feed and monitor patients. My admiration for each of them is endless.
Now I need some good podcast and movie recommendations. Reading makes me nauseous. And I am supposed to stay relatively still and not lift anything heavier than 5 pounds for 6 weeks.
Pray for my poor, wonderful, supportive husband who has to deal with me!
Nine more days until the nice neurosurgeon and the lovely ENT drill a hole in my head to carefully, slowly, delicately take out the tumor that is trying to strangle my facial nerves and knock me on my butt.
I’m scared. I do NOT want to be out cold for 8 or 9 hours while people are poking around in my brain. I do NOT want to be stuck in a big, loud, brightly lit, big city hospital for four or five days. I do NOT want to be in pain.
I’m scared.
But I am taking the sage advice of my older brother, who is powering through cancer treatment with the attitude that “it is what it is, and all will be well.” I am channeling the courage and strength of my friend Fran, a young mom who is dealing with breast cancer treatments by facing it directly and looking forward to having it behind her.
And I’m leaning on my sister, who is always hilarious. She has the most wonderful gallows humor that lifts her through life’s many struggles.
Therefore, let me tell you a few things about being an overweight, clumsy old woman with an acoustic neuroma. First of all, I have named him “Stanley.” I want to personalize him, and I want to make him something that is separate from me and my own personal body. Stanley seems like a good name for someone annoying, frustrating and slightly toxic. Someone who has been bugging you for years but who won’t go away.
On Aug. 5 we will send Stanley on his merry way and finally be free of him.
I am also choosing to look at the hilarious side of my wonky, wobbly self. Picture this: in the middle of an average day, when I am thinking about dinner and not about Stanley, I calmly reach into my dryer to pull out the clean clothes. WHOMP. I suddenly and unceremoniously tip over and land on my knees in my laundry basket. Oopsie. Nothing hurts, so what can you do except laugh?
I reach down casually to pull some weeds out of my garden. Same deal. WHOMPIE. I end up with a marigold up my nose. Could be worse, to quote my dear departed Momma.
I see myself walking down the hallway in my house, bonk on the right wall, bonk on the left. Sheesh. I am walking like a drunk and it’s 10 AM. Even my dogs look judgemental. What are you gonna do, right? It’s funny!
It’s funny to wake up in the middle of the night and wonder why someone is honking a car horn in this rural spot, and to realize that the sound is inside my head. It’s even funnier when everyone reacts to a sound and I say, “Oh, you mean that isn’t my brain?”
This will also be quite a learning experience, right? I studied a bit of brain anatomy and neurology many years ago when I was a grad student in speech/language pathology. It was cool to go over my MRI with the doctors. I look forward to seeing scans after Stanley moves out.
I’m also making plans for after the surgery. I am determined to get back to my old self as soon as possible. They say that recovery from this can take months, but I am looking to speed it up. In my effort to do that, I am doing a LOT of vestibular stimulation through my physical therapist. This means that at various times (like waiting in line for an amusement park ride with my grandkids) I stare at one spot in front of me and slowly swing my head from left to right and up and down. I look like an escapee from a local asylum.
It gives me lots of space in crowds, but it’s a little embarrassing. At least for my family. I don’t personally care how I look. I gotta get Stanley out and get back to life!
I am spending these next few days trying to relax. I am distracting myself with the sweet antics of bunnies and chipmunks in the yard. I am spending time with the people I love most dearly. Next week we’re having a “Bye, Stanley” party to celebrate and send him off. I hope to get to the ocean, my most healing and soothing place.
If you have any funny stories to share, please do! Stories about your own wobbles and wonkiness or about a friend’s experiences. Anything.
I have to laugh for nine more days.
After that I plan to moan, groan and demand that everybody baby me for a couple of weeks.
Waiting is such a difficult thing. I have been waiting for weeks to have surgery that will hopefully relieve some of the symptoms I am having from an acoustic neuroma. I don’t know how hard the surgery will be (How long will I be unconscious? How difficult will the microsurgery be? What complications might appear?) I don’t know what I will be feelings after it’s over. (How nauseous will I be? How manageable will the pain be? How long will it take before I can come home? Will I be safe to walk on my own?)
I was lucky; my surgery was scheduled only four weeks after I met my neurosurgeon.
Only four long, scary, challenging weeks. I am trying as hard as I can to stay busy. I am playing my violin, I am reading. I still play with and watch the grandkids. I am visiting local farmers markets and keeping up with news.
None of that matters.
I wake up scared and I spend all day trying to distract myself.
But I feel stuck. I feel helpless and immobilized.
I am like a tiny bug, trapped within a drop of amber, frozen in time and place.
Waiting.
I am a very very patient Nonni and was a very patient teacher.
I am NOT a patient patient. Let’s get it done. I want that tumor out of there. I want it out NOW. I want it gone so I can begin the next phase of life, whatever it looks like. I am ready to be partially deaf. I am ready to be off balance and to have a slightly droopy smile, all of which is likely.
I just can’t stand the waiting. Sitting still in my bubble of amber, unable to move forward, unable to help myself.
In an effort to comfort myself as I impatiently await surgery to take the acoustic neuroma out of my brain, I am attempting find humor in the situation.
Not easy.
“Oh, hahahaha! Funny, funny me! I was awake all night because of the incessant car horn that beeped every 15 seconds in my brain.” Nope.
“So let me tell you about how funny it is to carry a load of clothes downstairs without looking either up or down because you’ll fall if you do.” Old lady, falling downstairs. Nah, not that one, either.
H’m. How about a funny story of drinking a martini when you can’t feel a quarter of your tongue?
Here goes.
I like a martini now and again. Either a lemontini with fresh lemon or a good dirty martini with cheese-stuffed olives. Yum. I don’t indulge all that often, but given my new personal motto (“Leave me alone! I got a freakin’ brain tumor!”) I decided to have one the other night.
It was right after I made the epic mistake of googling “Recovering from acoustic neuroma”. I may have been the tiniest bit shaken by what I read. I may have been pacing around the living room looking for a distraction.
Or I may be a budding alcoholic looking for an excuse.
At any rate, I realized that, in the wise words of my dear departed father, “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” So I got out my shaker, the lemoncello, a lemon and a glass. Then I opened the freezer and pulled out the bottle of vodka that I always keep on ice. Old Russian trick, learned in my time in the Russian Department in college. Always keep your vodka icy.
I mixed up a super cold, super delicious, sweetly tart lemon martini and sat down on the deck to have a sip.
Now, I have to digress for a moment. Even though I am a mostly well-behaved old grandma, I have been known to overindulge in my wild youth. I mean, I WAS a Russian major, and we DID have a small freezer in our department office. A couple of shots between a literature class and a conversation class could make all the difference in fluency.
And after college, I worked for a couple of years as a Russian interpreter in Boston. Once an immigrant family had settled into their new home, they would have a little dinner party to thank the American social worker who had helped. I served as an interpreter at dozens of these dinners (lucky, lucky me….Oh, man, the borscht, the blini, the pelmenyi).
The conversation would go like this:
Russian raises a glass with a shot of vodka: “Many thanks to our wonderful American hosts! We can never repay you!” I interpret into English. We drink.
American social worker raises another shot: “Welcome to our country! We are lucky to have you!” I put this into Russian. We drink.
This could go on for 15 rounds before dinner is served. I am not sure of how accurate some of the later interpretations were, but nobody cared because nobody was clear enough to notice if it didn’t make sense.
At any rate, I learned rather quickly to slow down, to drink water, to keep talking and stop drinking when I noticed a few things. The first sign of complete inebriation was the tip of my nose feeling tingly and numb. The next warning sign was when my tongue tip turned numb. It would sort of feel like a big dose of Novacaine was wearing off. Itchy, numb, tingly.
I haven’t had this happen in years, I swear. I am old now. I am a good girl.
But the other day, as I took my first sip of ice-cold therapy, I realized that both the right side of my nose and the right side of my tongue tip are already numb, itchy and tingly. So is my cheeck. And the right side of both lips. And part of my right eyelid.
In fact, I feel like I have simultaneously been socked in the cheekbone and put on Novacaine. Alll day and all night. And it will be like that for at least another month, as I wait for my surgery date.
It was a rude awakening, for sure. It was so upsetting that I almost didn’t want the martini. But I don’t like to waste. So I drank it.
The second was better. By the third, both sides of my face were numb and I felt so much better!
Empty Nest, Full Life 